Julia is Gone from Nip/Tuck!

Julia is Gone from Nip/Tuck! by Roxanne McDonald

Actress Joely Richardson has had to leave Nip/Tuck, so Julia has of course left her family—or what’s left of it.

If you saw the futuristic episode of Nip/Tuck, with Conor and Annie grown and fussing at a reunion dinner with retiring Sean, polygamous Christian (two wives is legal), and Doctor Matt, you saw that a grown Conor revealed to his therapist that his Mom left his Dad when he was still a baby (about six months old). You then can infer that it was likely over the clawed hands, Sean wanting to operate immediately and Julia wanting to wait, or over Julia having slept with Marlowe and Sean having done the original nanny.

And some of you are griping about the aesthetic options made on the part of the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy.

One writer, for instance, bitches about how the futuristic scenes make for cheesy, hacky drama (see Tim Stack’s article, “Future Schlock”).

But I’m thinking that the future-tripping episode functioned quite well on many levels: we get to see the unique kinds of technology in Murphy’s vision—like the phone chips imbedded in people’s heads that they access with a touch to the temple. We get to see a really great development of Annie (played by the adorable Jennifer Elise Cox), who is agoraphobic, anorexic, and apoplectic over her parents’ neglect and who gets into trouble with the law, smokes, and rags on her aging and appropriately tired-looking parents, saying that this is what they get in a daughter who was psychologically warped, so “deal”. And we get to witness the departure and the reasons for the departure of Julia.

Actually, we understand that with Julia having left Sean twice before, that her taking off a third and final time makes sense, especially after she explains the mess the family has become because of the toxic nature of Sean’s business. Julia is the whiniest, and we might be glad to see her off.

However, we may not be so glad to lose the actress who plays Julia so well, just as we may not know the reasons for the actress portraying her leaving Nip/Tuck, reasons that parallel the crises of Nip/Tuck in uncanny ways. According to TV Guide writer Mary Murphy, Joely Richardson’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Daisy, has a rare circulatory condition that will require multiple leg surgeries. As Richardson explained to reporters,

“Surgeons and hospitals have been a big part of our lives….
We were always told that she would have to have more surgeries when she got older. The time has come.”

When asked if she might return one day to the show, Richardson unwittingly and interestingly said, “What the future holds nobody can say.”

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